We Need Quality Soil to Produce Quality Wine

How seriously do you take sustainability at Moët Hennessy? Very seriously indeed! On one hand, our position as a global leader in luxury wines and spirits means that we have a great sense of responsibility towards our stakeholders and our planet. On the other, there’s the fact that the quality of our product is determined directly by the soil quality, which in turn relies on us all taking care of the environment. The more we do to improve the quality of the soil, the better the grapes we have at our disposal. But our strategy goes well beyond the soil and terroir alone.

Caring for the environment ultimately means supporting and respecting others and bringing about positive changes to our society. We also have to bear in mind that our customers expect us to be leading the way when it comes to sustainability. Equally, we do everything in our power to encourage our customers to recycle empty bottles and packaging. Luckily, glass is a great material as far as recycling is concerned. Which organisations are you working with as part of your sustainability efforts? We have a number of partners. For example, the Moët Hennessy Group is working with a French NGO called Pour une Agriculture du Vivant. They are helping us to achieve our goals surrounding regenerative agriculture more quickly. We support the Fondation Albert de Monaco with funding so that experts can research innovative ways to promote biodiversity. Our parent company LVMH is also working hard.

A key part of their strategy is to collaborate with UNESCO on biodiversity. We also always try to partner up with local NGOs in every one of our active markets. Can you tell us about Moët Hennessy’s sustainability projects in more detail? Ruinart, one of our champagne houses, planted 4,000 trees and hedges over an area of 40 hectares to investigate the impact of biodiversity on vineyards. Whilst it’s obvious that more trees and hedges are bound to bring with them more living things and diversity, concrete figures paint a clearer picture.

Exciting work is being done all over the world. We are looking to launch a flagship sustainability project at our Château du Galoupet estate, which is known for its rosé wine. We are even taking a biodynamic approach to cultivating some of the vines. Elsewhere, we are investing with Hennessy in partnership with ReforestAction in regeneration of forests in Cognac but also in Nigeria, Kenya and China, with the aim of creating new habitats by planting more trees. How do you involve the staff in Moët Hennessy’s sustainability efforts? We have launched an online training tool to cover the basics given that a fundamental understanding is the key to success.

Our employees need to know why climate change is such a problem, why biodiversity is so important and why social issues are crucial. All our activities aimed at taking care of the environment and of the people are also covered on the online training tool along with an overview of how the world is changing and of what our stakeholders are doing. We have been taking sustainability seriously for some time now, but we haven’t always done the best job of communicating that. It is important to us that we can strike the right balance between sustainability and profitability. There’s no way of having one without the other. Do you think that companies without a sustainability strategy will still be able to attract highly qualified applicants? I don’t think so. The kind of talented young people we would like to hire don’t waste any time in asking about our sustainability projects.

We are only able to convince them to work for us when we can confi­dently communicate our environmental, social and societal efforts. We have teams of volunteers in a number of countries who get involved outside of a work setting. For example, the Swiss volunteers organised a clean-up day in autumn 2020, which involved them ridding Lake Geneva of invasive plants. In 2021, they also set themselves the goal of picking up as much waste as possible up in the mountains. The mountains give us so much, so this was our chance to give something back to them.

Words Alex Kuehn